PirateBrowser downloaded 100K+ times in days

Pirate Bay's censor-dodging Firefox mod a hit

Torrent indexing website the Pirate Bay is celebrating a massive 100,000 downloads of its 10th anniversary, censorship dodging 'PirateBrowser' in just a few days.

The browser, a mish mash of Firefox portable, foxyproxy, and Tor, is designed specifically to get around government blockades placed on torrent services and other websites.

Countries like the UK, Belgium, Italy, and Ireland have imposed blocks on accessing the Pirate Bay and more.

In the United Kingdom, internet filters will become default for all ISP packages, so the browser has its purposes beyond torrenting.

However, the browser does not guarantee anonymity - to get that rare commodity, the Pirate Bay recommends signing up with a trusted Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to route your traffic through. Nor is it entirely secure.

The immediate success of the browser will be a blow to governments like the United Kingdom's, where its deeply unpopular policy, usually dressed up as a moral crusade to protect children, is being used to decide what is and isn't acceptable for grown adults to access online.

The Pirate Bay itself has long been a target of content industry backed politicians, who are told piracy is an enormous threat to the economy. The website, its admins and owners have frequently been vocal about its opposition to policies it views as restrictive to web freedoms.